The World Falls Away On Either Side
by Laura Schiller
Summary: Tag to "The Disease", with spoilers for "Pandemonium". After losing Tal, Harry turns to a hologram of his favorite writer for advice and inspiration.


The World Falls Away On Either Side

By Laura Schiller

Crossover: _Star Trek: Voyager/Delirium Trilogy_

Copyright: Paramount/Lauren Oliver

"Computer," said Harry, squinting to focus on the access panel as he typed in commands. "Activate holodeck program Haloway Two. Adjust my physical parameters to the following specifications."

The holodeck doors slid open and he stepped inside, his Starfleet uniform overlaid with a simulation of a battered windbreaker, patched shirt, jeans and sneakers. He programmed a fake three-pointed scar to appear on his neck, and even ruffled his hair to try and counter the effects of 24th-century grooming products; it wouldn't do to look too clean if he wanted to pass for an Invalid.

_"In the early twenty-first century,_" began the voiceover, a young woman's voice speaking with cool detachment._ "The depletion of oil reserves, the resulting worldwide economic crisis and the rise in poverty and social unrest led to the rise of several extremist movements, particularly in the United States of America … "_

"Computer, skip intro." Having earned top marks in recent Earth history at the Academy, Harry knew the context of this program: how religious zealot Cormac Holmes had labeled sexual attraction, and later all forms of love, as a disease; how he had hit on brain surgery as a cure, depriving his patients of nearly all emotion; how too many desperate people longing for order, purpose and peace had taken him seriously, including President Paul Fineman, who had forced the cure through as a mandatory procedure for every adult above eighteen. Several years and one brutal civil war later, the "land of the free" had become a dictatorship to rival Nazi Germany, just waiting for the right spark to ignite a revolution. This particular holonovel was set in 2071, shortly before said revolution, as it was based on the memoirs of Magdalena Haloway, a young resistance member who would later go on to take full advantage of the restoration of democracy – and the end of censorship – by becoming a journalist and poet.

Harry enjoyed spending time with her holographic persona almost as much as reading her work. How he would have loved to introduce her to Tal.

He shook his head to dislodge the memories, only to feel a fresh surge of headache. He turned his face to the autumn wind instead, refreshed by the coolness on his hot skin. The smell of earth and leaf mould, the rustle of trees and the lonely calls of a flock of geese overhead felt so real to him, he almost called for the arch to make sure he wasn't back on Earth in an American forest. By the time he reached the eccentric haven that was Salvage, oddly reminiscent of Vidiians in its patched-together state, he was almost too tired to seek out Lena as he had planned.

As it turned out, she found him, rescuing him from a halfhearted game of poker with Tack and Raven.

"Where'd you pick up this loser, anyhow?" grumbled Tack, eyeing him dubiously, as if he were a rabbit too thin to put in the stew. "He can't play for beans."

Ordinarily Harry did not mind him, after five years of Tuvok's severity and B'Elanna's temper, but today he grimaced.

"Give it a rest, Tack," said Raven. "He's a newbie. No gambling in Zombieland, remember?"

"Actually, guys, you're right." Harry folded his cards, smiling awkwardly. "I should probably stop before I lose my shirt. Hey, Lena? Want to come check the nests?"

"It's Lu's turn tonight." Tack pointed out, his sharp brown eyes narrowed, as if wondering what the newbie could possibly want to talk about with Lena in private. Walking out to check the birds' nests near the border fence, which were colored by paint on the feet of messenger birds belonging to the city's sympathizers, was one of the few occasions that two people in this crowded refuge _could_ talk in private.

"No, no, it's fine." Lena held up her hand to block her mentor's suspicions. "C'mon. _Up_ you go," she grunted, hauling him from his crosslegged position back to his feet. "You look like shit, by the way. Please don't tell me you're coming down with something, the sickroom's already full."

"Nice to see you too," he retorted, smiling even as he raised his eyes to the ceiling.

"Be back before dark, you hear?" Raven called after them as they left the room. Lena raised her hand in casual acknowledgement.

Following Lena into the dormitory to get her coat, out of the house and down the thin path worn through the underbrush, Harry took advantage of her brusque, but not unfriendly silence to look at her. She was small for an eighteen-year-old, appearing even smaller due to oversized secondhand clothes, but there was a wiry, confident strength in the way she moved that warned all bystanders not to underestimate her. Her stringy ponytail whipped back and forth as she walked, her hazel eyes alert to her surroundings. She reminded him of a wildcat, or of B'Elanna.

"So," she started eventually, glancing back at him over her shoulder. "What's up?"

He hesitated a bit on how to phrase his story, but decided on the simplest approach. "You're right, Lena. I _am_ sick. Don't worry though," seeing the flash of concern in her eyes. "It's just the _deliria_. Some version of it, anyway. I've been told it's not life-threatening."

Lena slowed her steps to walk beside him, nudged his elbow and grinned. "Congratulations, Harry! Who's the lucky girl? Or boy. Hunter says I shouldn't judge … " Something in his face must have tipped her off, because she fell abruptly silent and lowered her eyes.

"It … didn't work out," he said, his hands in his pockets. "She was a resister like us, but she took it too far … pulled a stunt that could have gotten lots of people killed."

He thought of the cold bath of humiliation he had gone through when Tuvok had interrupted his shuttlecraft tryst with Tal to inform them of her complicity in the sabotage of the generational ship. _To some of us, it's a prison_, he remembered her arguing, petite and defiant, glaring up at her stony-faced captain. _We must respect the rights of the majority, yes, but what about the rights of the minority?_ Her goal had been laudable, but programming those synthetic parasites to eat away the links between the segments of the ship had produced the side effect of several dangerous explosions. Thank God the place had been evacuated in time.

Then he thought of the heartbreaking courage in her smile as they said goodbye, and felt guilty for his judgmental thoughts. What did a sheltered Federation citizen understand about living under oppressive governments, anyway? Apart from historic holoprograms, anyway.

Poor Lena, he thought, on the subject of resistance leaders fighting dirty. Little did she know, in this timeframe, that her own mentors were about to throw her to the wolves with that kidnapping plot involving Julian Fineman.

"I couldn't look at her the same way after that," he continued, "But I couldn't take the cure either. So I came here."

He remembered, both to his embarrassment and pride, the shouting match he had started with Captain Janeway over his refusal to take the Doctor's "cure" for his biochemical bond with Tal. Ensign Kim _never_ shouted at his Captain. It had been satisfying to follow his own heart for once instead of someone else's orders, but as the same decision had left him with insomnia, headaches, hot flashes and indigestion – not to mention good old human heartbreak from missing Tal – the satisfaction had quickly become hollow.

"So tell me about her," Lena suggested, a little too brightly. "She must have really been something."

"She was."

_Tal._ Curled up in bed after lovemaking like a sleek cat. Smiling wickedly over the viewscreen of her computer, her auburn hair rolled into a crown. Scanning a Class-Three nebula, of all things, with a scientist's dedication and a child's delight. Ferociously defending his honor to Jippeq in the matter of the sabotage. Literally glowing, a small, hot supernova in his arms.

"She was a very … take-charge sort of woman. With her resistance cell and with me. She knew what she wanted and she wasn't afraid to go after it."

"How open-minded of you," commented Lena. "No wonder you got enough of Zombieland. _Let the wife submit to her husband as to God … _" Her derisive air quotes made it clear that she was citing Holmes' Bible, _The Book of Safety, Health and Happiness_.

"Yeah, well." Harry couldn't resist a goofy smile at the memory of how she had pinned him to her bed and pulled his shirt off in a most unsubmissive manner. "We had fun. She was … into astronomy, like me. We used to look at the stars together and imagine going up to explore them … "

"Like astronauts?"

"Exactly. She just loved life, you know what I mean? It was like a miracle to me, that someone could be like that, even growing up in what was practically a prison. She wasn't afraid of anything new or different – those things fascinated her. I wanted that. I wanted to be like her."

"She inspired you," was Lena's quiet summary of his feelings. He couldn't have said it better himself.

He found himself blushing at the memory of their first night together, when they had explored each other with such joyful curiosity, until the blush became something more and he had to throw off the hood of his coat to cool down. Lena backed away from him, her eyes wide as saucers.

"Holy crap!" she yelped. "They never mentioned _this_ in the _Book of Shh_ – "

He took his hands out of his pockets – and yes, they were lit up like a warp core. He groaned.

"Computer, freeze program."

He took deep breaths, throught about Neelix's revolting coffee substitutes as the least romantic image his brain could muster, and waited until his hands – and hopefully his face – had gone back to normal.

"Computer, resume program."

His holographic companion frowned, squinted, and shook her head. This time it was her turn to blush, looking like a teenage girl for once instead of the tough-as-nails resistance fighter she was trying so hard to be.

"Oh my gosh, Harry, I'm sorry! For a moment there, it looked like you were shining. Like an angel or something. Weird, eh?"

"Me as an angel? Definitely."

"No offense."

They laughed together and continued down the path, the sunset turning golden through the trees.

"Maybe it was stupid of me though," he said, after a pause. "After all, it's not like I didn't know the risks we were taking – not just for ourselves, but our friends and colleagues too. It was in the heat of the moment," he concluded ruefully, thinking of the Captain's scolding. _We want to help these people, and you put that in jeopardy … I expected better of you._

"I know the feeling," Lena agreed, a grim edge to her voice and the set of her jaw. Although she hadn't told him yet – even as a hologram, her trust had to be earned – he knew from reading the text version of her memoirs that it had been only months since her escape from Portland and her separation from her first lover and mentor, Alexander Sheathes. Believing him dead, she was deeply in mourning, channeling it into rage against the society which had torn them apart.

"I've done some pretty stupid things myself, you know," she said. "Most of us do. At least, stupid from a self-preservation point of view. But would you really rather spend your life behind glass, like the cureds, afraid to make mistakes, afraid of doing _anything_ but what you've been told? If we didn't screw up every now and then, how would we learn?"

"You think so?"

"I know so. At least, between Lena from last year and Lena from today, I know who _I_'d rather be. Don't you?"

This time, it was Captain Janeway she reminded him of: _You may not be the perfect officer anymore, but you're a better man._ Was he really? Or was he just an immature ensign whose misbehavior took more out of him than he'd expected?

"I guess … "

"I think you were brave not to take the cure," said Lena, taking his arm, looking up into his face with sincere respect. "Harry … even though you haven't been here very long, I can tell you're not much of a risk-taker. You're polite, you don't like making waves. Just like I used to be. That's how I know you must have loved her very much. Denying a love like that with the cut of a surgeon's knife just wouldn't have been right."

_It was a hypospray_, he almost said, _but it's the same idea._

Disease, he knew, was as much cultural as biological. For hundreds of years on Earth, homosexuality had been labeled a mental illness long before Holmes' era. On Vulcan, those who displayed any emotion were regarded as dangerously unstable. To the Doctor and Captain Janeway, Harry and Tal's bond was a disease – but to the Varro, it was sacred and honored. Harry's choice had been to honor it, and Lena's words echoing from three centuries ago made him confident it was the right choice.

_We call it the olan'vora, the shared heart. It won't hurt you,_ he remembered Darren Tal saying, her laughing gray eyes looking serious for once as she held his hands. _But it will change you._ It certainly had.

"I did love her," he said, with quiet certainty. "And if that means it hurts to miss her, that's a price I'm willing to pay."

Lena nodded, unspoken grief shadowing her eyes, before putting on a brave smile not unlike Tal's.

"Love," she murmured thoughtfully. "Strange, isn't it? Two-sided, like a knife."

"_An edge, a razor,_" Harry quoted. _"It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side."_

Lena stared up at him, both amused and deeply impressed. "Wow … where did that come from?"

"Something I read."

For a moment, he savored the private amusement of echoing one of Madgalena Haloway's most famous quotes back to her without her knowing it, but there was also a sadness to the moment he could not quite put his finger on.

_She's non-sentient_, he realized._ Of course. She doesn't know what her future will be; she doesn't even know she's a hologram. She's programmed to believe that 21st-century America, cures and guns and barbed wire and all, is still real. I wish I could have met the real Lena Haloway, shown her my world the way this program shows me hers. _

"There's a better world coming, Lena," he told her earnestly. "One where everybody will be free to love whoever they choose. Class, race, gender, it won't matter. You've got to believe in it."

_If you knew … after just a few decades, that fragile new country of yours will go through hell in the Eugenics Wars, along with the rest of the planet. You'll be afraid it's the end of civilization as you know it. But your children and grandchildren will work hard and dream big, and by the time First Contact happens, Earth will be a planet to be proud of._

"I hope so," said Lena, looking up at him rather dubiously. He could just imagine how naïve he must sound to her – apparently he couldn't shed that reputation, even in the holodeck. _What the hell. If nobody had thought like this in her century, the Federation would never have happened._

"I know so," he insisted.


End file.
